In Amsterdam this week?

Today an unrelated, yet passionate plug for my brother Yuri, who presents his new album Meet Your Demons at De Melkweg in Amsterdam this week.

If you like some (con)fusion, you might want to check it out. However, note that subtlety was never his merit ;-)

Good vibrations at science festival?

Currently I am at the Cheltenham Science Festival in England, an annual five-day ‘feast of debate, delight and entertainment’, as the organizers promote it.

And indeed, it is quite an extraordinary initiative: a festival with an attendance that can easily be compared to a popular jazz or pop festival. Next to numerous one-hour lectures, there were several panels, debates, and presentations by scientists like Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins and Martin Rees.

Yesterday night I presented, together with neuroscientist Martin Coath (Plymouth University), the results of our European EmCAP research consortium on music cognition. All this under the, admittedly, somewhat smooth title ‘Good Vibrations’.

Martin Coath, a gifted speaker and FameLab finalist, got a large crowd enthusiastically doing a live experiment on relative pitch, and I presented our latest research on the similarities in listening skills between expert musicians and ‘ordinary’ listeners. Furthermore, we gave a preview of some of the preliminary results of collaborative work done with the research team of Istvan Winkler (Budapest) on, e.g., the sensitivity for rhythm and beat induction in babies of just one or two days old.
N.B. More on this at the end of this month when we will present the actual results at the Neuroscience & Music Conference in Montreal.

Want to join the finals?

Next week the final of the Academische Jaarpijs will be held in Leiden, The Netherlands. The UvA-team aims to show that we all have a talent for music, and that the listener actually plays an active role in what makes music special. This will be communicated to a larger audience by a website and a tv-show, made by the UvA-team in collaboration with five partners from the creative industry.
Below, a sneak preview of one of our rehearsals (the enthousiastic 'voice-over' is by group member Leigh M. Smith :-)

Een luisterende machine? [Dutch]

This week another fragment of the video that was directed by Bob van Gijzel (AVC/UvA) as part of a series of short films with the title De Fascinatie: Scholars and scientists from the Universiteit van Amsterdam talk about their fascination in research:



Click here for the full episode.

Final ritards in Balinese music?

This week an interesting article appeared in Empirical Musicology Review, an open peer-reviewed journal on music. Andrew McGraw (University of Richmond) discusses the use of tempo-change in Balinese music.

The most common kind of tempo-change is often referred to as the ‘final ritard’: the typical slowing down at the end of a music performance, apparent in Javanese and Balinese gamelan music, music from the Western Baroque and Romantic period, but also in quite some pop and jazz genres.

An important contribution to this topic is made by a family of computational theories, so-called ‘kinematic models’, that propose an explicit relation between the laws of physical motion (elementary mechanics) in the real world and chaneg of tempo (so-called "expressive timing") in music performance. These models were shown to produce a good fit with a variety of empirical performance data, suggesting that the final ritard alludes to human movement: the pattern of runners’ deceleration.

Unfortunately, the McGraw study is yet another example of a study that takes ‘tempo curves’ too seriously as a potential description, or even mental representation, of tempo-change in music (A hobby horse of mine that I shouldn't bring in once more; cf. here).

Furthermore, the author seems to be unaware of the notorious mistake made by Feldman, Epstein and Richards (MIT, Cambridge, Mass.) in their 1992 study. In there the authors propose a theory of tempo change (or rubato) based on the laws of physical motion, but in the end fit the empirical data to models unrelated to these laws. So indeed, the conclusion that "previous idealized models are too simplistic to describe Balinese music" is correct. In fact, it has been shown for both music performance and music perception. The challenge is still to model the regularity and structure that can characterize this particular use of tempo rubato.

Nevertheless, the paper is a much needed contribution to music perception and cognition research by studying other than Western classical music, a genre that is still dominating the literature.

McGraw, A.C. (2008). The Perception and Cognition of Time in Balinese Music. Empirical Musicology Review, 3(2), 38-54.

HONING, H. (2005). IS THERE A PERCEPTION-BASED ALTERNATIVE TO KINEMATIC MODELS OF TEMPO RUBATO?. Music Perception, 23(1), 79-85. DOI: 10.1525/mp.2005.23.1.79

Amsterdam Weekly reader?

Today a short entry for readers of the Amsterdam Weekly that have been referred to this blog: The test mentioned in the article by Laura Bruun can be found here.

"Zonder luisteraar geen muziek" [Part 3]

Today our team finalized an elaborate communication plan to promote music cognition research to a larger audience. It is part of the demands for university research teams that are nominated for the Dutch Academische Jaarprijs (an initiative of NRC Handelsblad in cooperation with NWO, KNAW and Shell; see earlier blog-entries with the same tag).

We will have to defend our plan on June 11th in the Leidse Schouwburg (photo above), when also the winner of the Battle of the Universities 07/08 will be announced. We can't say too much about our plans (it's supposed to be a 'battle' :-) but see below some snippets of the opening and ending of an interactive dvd that accompanies our ambitious plans. We hope the jury will like it.

Lure(d) into listening?

This weekend there was a Matchmaking meeting event in Paris, organized by HERA —an EU 6th Framework Programme ERA-NET project aiming at strengthening the European voice in the Humanities—, on Cultural Dynamics and the Creative Industry.

The idea our group brought forward was Listen, Lure & Locate: A Project on Music, Internet and Listening Cultures that proposes to investigate older and newer internet technologies that support sharing musical taste and exchange of musical listening experiences.

The proposal (in preparation) aims not only to analyze and explicate these existing listening communities (e.g. Last.fm, YouTube, Pandora) but also to actively experiment with Web 2.0 technologies by designing and constructing virtual listening spaces that will allow participants to share their listening experiences (LISTEN), make other listeners enthusiastic for a certain musical fragment (LURE), and mark a specific location in an actual recording (LOCATE) - a specific point in the music where a particular listener experienced something special or that s/he considers musically striking or intriguing.

The LOCATE-component of the project was inspired by some early work of John Sloboda (Keele University). He found that a large portion of music listeners could locate (in the score or a recording) specific musical passages that reliably evoked, e.g., shivers down the spine, laughter, tears or a lump in the throat (Sloboda, 1991).

At the meeting I asked several people the question mentioned below. Take part in an online poll?



Sloboda, J.A. (1991). Music Structure and Emotional Response: Some Empirical Findings. Psychology of Music, 19(2), 110-120. DOI: 10.1177/0305735691192002

Muziek speelt met de luisteraar [Dutch]

This week a video that was directed by Bob van Gijzel (AVC/UvA) as part of a series of short films with the title De Fascinatie: Scholars and scientists from the Universiteit van Amsterdam talk about their fascination in research. This one is on music cognition. Below a short fragment (in Dutch):


Click here for the full episode.

Can newborns make sense of rhythm? (Part 2)

In search of the origins of music perception, our European research consortium (named EmCAP) investigates questions such as whether or not newborns possess the ability to process music. However, while we all intuitively feel that babies like rhythms and melodies, we don’t know how they perceive music. This week the MTAPI team started a first series of experiments to test whether rhythm and meter perception is active in newborn infants.

Our hypothesis is that a rhythmic stimulus (we use a simple drum pattern), when occasionally modified in two distinct metrical positions (a temporal oddball), should be perceived more easily as a deviation if the modification happens in a metrically strong position as compared to one in a weaker metrical position, as such indicating that a metrical expectation is active. These so-called oddballs are expected to elicit the mismatch negativity (MMN) event related brain potential (ERP), a well-known response that is elicited by violations of a detected acoustic regularity.

One of the reasons this particular method was chosen was that it allows us to use the same technique and the same rhythmic stimuli for both adult non-musicians and newborn infants. The preliminary results confirm the hypothesis for adults. Needless to say we are more than curious for what the newborn study will show us. We hope to present the first results at the upcoming Neurosciences and Music conference in Montreal this summer.

Honing, H., Ladinig, O., Winkler, I., Haden, G. (in press) Probing emergent meter perception in adults (and newborns) using event-related brain potentials: a pilot study. Proceedings of the Neurosciences and music III Conference. Montreal: McGill University.